Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” ―
In Andreas Feininger’s landmark book, Photographic Seeing, in a section called “The Different Forms of Seeing” he discusses how four different and well-known (in 1973) photographers might (key word) photograph an identical female subject. He then posits a theory that their “differences in ‘seeing’ would, of course, reflect in their work” and goes on to eviscerate each of their hypothetical images as “sterile,” “dull,” “unimaginative,” “stereotypical and rather cold.” Yikes!
Are you who you photograph? My friend Rick Sammon has a theory about this subject and phrases it this way: “The camera looks both ways” and thinks “that in picturing the subject, you are also picturing a part of yourself.” After reading that particular section of Feininger’s book, Rick’s concept came to mind as I lie in bed last night (instead of sleeping) thinking about what my portraits of women say about me. I don’t want to bother you with all of the neo-Freudian ideas that ran through my mind but the concept was still fresh in my mind in the morning. Hence this post.
And yet here’s another theory: Richard Avedon once said,“ My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” I think he meant that when he makes a portrait he likes to control as much of the environment, and maybe even the subject themselves to create a photograph of his subject that reflect his image of them, not how the subject sees themselves. Maybe, and I may be all wet, that this approach applies to my studio glamour images as well. And the more I think about it, the more it seems to ring true. Or maybe it’s just another form of OCD that maybe all/some/many photographers have because we all want to reorder the world into how we imagine it should be.
How I Made this Portrair: The image illustrating today’s post is of the incomparable Pamela Simpson and for a while I ran a series of portraits of Pam on my old blog featuring different kinds portraits of this talented model that were made over the past several years. I count myself lucky to have met Pam and extremely lucky in being able to photograph her for several years. What does this image and the other images of her say about me? I dunno but some thoughts in that last paragraph seem to ring true.
Do you think you are who you photograph? Or is this just a cockamamie idea to start with?
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography with new copies available from Amazon for $34.95, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price around nine bucks and the Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.